Otter Creek, Mt. Desert

In the summer of 1850 Frederic Church, then 24, went to Maine to paint the coast, and that August the Bulletin of the American Art-Union reported that he had gone with one picture in mind, Clearing Up, Coast of Sicily by the German painter Andreas Achenbach, which the New York press had praised. His teacher Thomas Cole had already painted on Mount Desert Island six years earlier. Maine still counted as wilderness, and two years before, a New York magazine had carried Henry David Thoreau's account of climbing Katahdin in the interior. This small canvas looks across the shore at Otter Creek toward the island's mountains, with a settlers' cottage at their foot. The museum names the peaks as Cadillac and Dorr mountains. In 1850 Cadillac was still called Green Mountain, the name it kept until 1918.